‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ film review: Gore Verbinski and Sam Rockwell unleash unlimited glee in the end-times comedy

Science fiction can be heavy and allegorical or light-hearted and still put across a serious message. Gore Verbinski’s return to the director’s chair after a 10-year-break offers a movie from the latter category.

Well-beloved sci-fi themes from AI becoming self-aware to time loops and visitors from the future are presented in a bouncy, nerdy, fizzy manner. The movie is presided over by Sam Rockwell’s “man from the future” having a blast and sweeping us along on a tidal wave of energy.

At 10.10 pm (the clock with cutlery for hands is a cool touch) in an LA diner, a man in a transparent raincoat with all sorts of weird accoutrements announces himself as coming from the future and needing volunteers to stop the end of the world.

The man is from a blasted future where people got so involved with their virtual lives that they did not realise food and other essential supplies had run out till it was too late. Since he does not know the exact combination of saviours required to save the world, this is the man’s 118^th attempt at getting it right.

The people at the diner when they are able to drag their eyes from their devices believe him somewhat. This time around, after telling Gerald, who puts up his hand to help in stopping the apocalypse (Gerald has a bad knee and has been an albatross 29 times), the man forces Scott (Asim Chaudhry), Bob (Daniel Barnett), Marie (Georgia Goodman), Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz) to join in the revolution.

Two women, Susan (Juno Temple) and Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson) volunteer and the man allows them to join after an initial hesitation. We learn about the backgrounds and past lives of some of the team. Mark and Janet were teachers and when Mark got mesmerised by one of his student’s phones and touched it, the students seem to have been activated by a similar image on their phones to attack Mark and Janet.

A still from ‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’
| Photo Credit:
Briarcliff Entertainment

Susan loses her son, Darren (Riccardo Drayton), to a school shooting. Upon hearing of a company that can bring her son back in the form of a clone, Susan is distressed by the clone Darren’s unnerving strangeness.

Ingrid has a condition where she cannot be around Wi-Fi (which like her parents tell the doctor, is practically a death sentence). Ingrid seems to find her groove, being a princess at children’s birthday parties and finding a kindred spirit in Tim (Tom Taylor). The idyll, however, is shattered when Tim gets a virtual reality device.

Verbinski, who has done some heavy-duty genre hopping with The Ring and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, injects Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die with a kind of unhinged fun that is attractive once you sign on for the ride. There are bright pops of colour and neon, and that strange centaur thing with an eerily expressive cat face is a sly dig in a variety of ways.

There are a host of clever ideas and prescient worries that Verbinski asks us to think about, delivered in his signature blend of playful chaos, driving music, and heart.

And even if one does not want to think of the horror of being tethered to devices, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is all kinds of clever fun with Rockwell’s outrageous performance propelling the film to zany heights.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is currently running in theatres